Have I been understood? Dionysius with the crucified.

For neither one is there such a thing as "against."

Drunken Ramblings:

I don't want to transcend the ego. My goals are quite a bit more modest. To dwell along side it; to walk into it, go through its corridor and emerge from the other side. To let it be, and be other things besides. Even: to draw from it as a well, and drink from hidden waters--even in lieu of refreshment. A well that is just drawing the stuff of the self-same world I am in today, but doubled over and made...liquid. A well that drinks in the waters of the world, pooling them for the draw.

Do I make myself clear?

Reply to Ray's reply to "Monism and Dualism:"

http://mindingwith.blogspot.com/2010/12/monism-andor-dualism-and-incipient.html#comments

I wrote out this reply and it ended up being quite long, so I thought it deserved its own post jst to increase the chances it will be read by anyone other than myself...

It is a dangerous thing to try to escape something in thought. This can change the thought into a thing that haunts; that drives one on a trajectory that arises out of the pursuit of what one flees, and is hence determined by something from behind. Or, the escape could be from not a monster but from a topos--the thought as a prison, and the thinker as the prison break. this is dangerous too, since the thought as prison is like a labyrinth that does not mark its entrance or exit. Even if you've gotten out of the hedges or the high stone walls, how do you not know that you haven't just another chamber in the labyrinth--the labyrinth as city, as field, as desert, as sky. The labyrinth even in love, family, friends. The labyrinth as all.

One could almost say: the labyrinth is as labyrinth does; and a labyrinth is perhaps defined precisely as walls built in such as way as to compel escape, for we can imagine a labyrinth that has all one needs in it, and has all one cares about in it. Can you imagine being in a labyrinth with one's friends and trying to find a way out? One tactic would be: lets all break apart and search separately for the exit. That way at least some of us might get out, and we would increase our chances many fold rather than staying in a single group. This, of course, assumes the labyrinth has an exit, or that it isn't infinite.

Yet, another tactic would be to search together for a clearing in the labyrinth and settle there. Build a place; dwell in the labyrinth. And one could imagine that this clearing, too, could even be infinite, or as long as we're speaking in terms of the mind just as big as one wants it to be. Then it wouldn't so much be in the labyrinth at all, but both would be in each other. It may even be that we are wandering the labyrinth searching for the exit out into the field, when we're already there: maybe the path between the walls of this labyrinth is infinitely wide to dwell in, or the enclosing walls infinitely far away. When we speak of labyrinths of the mind it makes sense to talk this way, assuming it makes sense to talk of labyrinths of the mind.

The final question is of the combination of an imperative to both types of flight at once: the labyrinth and minotaur. Here we can play with infinities again: for, as I think we noted together once, it is perhaps this notion of infinity that is more labyrinth than any labyrinth--while at the same time being the secret of man. What if the minotaur is infinite? If the minotaur is a dimension of psychic existence, he is to that degree quite infinite so far as we're concerned. Infinite bull-headed mouth-god driving into us as in chase, while also taking us in as a devouring? The minotaur as just the principle of motion that impels/compels us in its entrails. A most terrifying idea, that our cherished free will in moving about this labyrinth is actually the flexing push of the walls that press around us in our surroundings, in our organs, even in our cells.

But here is a further mind-bending: what if we, as finite, do not move at all? What if we are, as fixed points, what these innards push off to move,moving around our sight as do the clouds in the sky? Surely if things are infinite, as we've said, then there can be no linear progress in a certain direction towards the entrance or the exit. Hence the scenery of the halls changes around us, rather than us moving through the scenery. Or, at least, it makes the same amount of sense to speak in either way, and truth be told we both move and are moved by virtue of our finitude.

Then an awful truth dawns on us: we are the walls, the minotaur, the labyrinth and we seek an escape from ourselves. And the labyrinth endless captures/devours itself while fleeing into and out of itself. We are, in our flesh and blood, part of the labyrinth. Likewise (and this is an important reversal) the labyrinth is our self-same flesh and blood. I know that you are a connoisseur of our culture's high art, so I need not be embarrassed by introducing the idea of Gomtuu, or the Tin Man (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tin_Man_(episode) .) We are only in prison insofar as the walls are lifeless and held out against us. But what if they are full of life and mind scarcely such that we could even conceive of it? I tell you, if we could hear a tiny fraction of what these walls feel, we would have a starship. For, as it is written, "So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" and "if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." Yet it is also written: "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."

This lends a new meaning to the notion of a "spaceship earth." Though, truth be told, we stay only on a single circular path instead of having a warp drive to travel to distant star systems. Perhaps a better term would be "timeship" for we plunge into the warping of the future that is constantly changing the topos of earth, by us in us through us. and we see, on this analogy, just what we are in our own Gomtuu, earth: we are the warp drive through time. We are the bending of time together in order to accelerate the creation of new spaces. Creation is the stationary voyage. It is how we get to new places without leaving home. But the labyrinth is the prison of the earth, and is infinite only by means of a circumnavigation or looping unto itself. There is just such an order today, and it keeps us from the earth that is made to be only beneath our feet.

Regarding the question of everything and nothing, i reply with a bit of dialog from the Japanese interlocutor in Heidegger's A Dialog on Language: "We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak in that lecture. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word 'being.'" This isn't to say that we have represented the "European" perspective, or I am "turning Japanese." Obviously we are all Americans here, though I would stress this in a positive sense as the people who are out of reach of the priests: "The priest did not turn west. He knew in the west there lay a plane of consistency, but he thought it was blocked by the column of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. but that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions rediscovered or deterritorialized. It was not for nothing that permaculture started in the place where the British empire met, and attempted to swallow, the land of the dream time, and started dreaming dreams of the earth;nor that in those green islands in the expanse of deserts and mountains in the American est it has taken root.

No doubt that in working with the two-fold room must be made for the freedom of the things from the everything, and from nothing, and from love; and they must have a place that gives itself over to this meeting, where things come into their own together. Love gives us this; for love is the word in which to be in love is to be in love with. And, indeed, this love is consummated in the with, without which it would not be there. "for where there are two or three gathered together -- to my name, there am I in the midst of them.'" Love is what you can be in, without being determined by the thing you are in. It gives the things a place to be together as they are, without one consuming or encompassing the other.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end."

So far as the twofold, the things circulate from love that gives a place to be as they are--both with as against each other and for themselves, and with as in with each other--and into the totalizing everything-and-nothing. This circulating is the arising and the abeyance, where things come into their own, from out of nothing, and pass back into nothing by the totalizing claim of the all. and love goes into the nothing and finds the things, but it is never fully claimed by the all. even as the all fully encloses it, it comes into its own as the giving site, which the all is drawn into to be--just another thing among things.

This is what gives us confidence that as we travel in the timeship, we hang together as one earth despite the divisions in feeling, where we can even be in the same room with other humans and not know anything of the truth of their feeling. suffering and joy and whole worlds can be together unknowingly in the same place. we are divided but guided by the way; and when we pass through deserts or cold mountains we are not abandoned to them. These divisions clear to a place where they are always meeting;and this victory, though always won out over the death of individuals, will become as a force and a "new sun" for us to travel by.

Nevertheless, I have matured since writing the short post that prompted this matter, and I would not be so hasty to declare "love!"

these are some pertinent videos to think about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfR_HWMzgyc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfDlY1WuXUQ

A Revision:

"If you build it they will come" becomes: "If you start building it they will come and help you build it."

The Anarchist Conspiracy:

They control everything--they even control themselves. Therefore, everyone is controlled; therefore: no one is in in control. That is why everything is out of control.

Reply to "The End of History."

You've tapped into a few important veins here. First, the conflicts of the twentieth century arose out of totalizing ideologies that can be understood in a broad sense as setting up, for the globe, a unified world history that proceeds through dialectic. This unification of previously disparate, or at least multiple, histories through dialectic was something constructed in discourse, and then returned upon the world as tremendous machines crossing the lines of economics, politics, and ideology and organized according to one of a few of a finite number of vantages or interpretations of this new logic of history.

The central idea was, indeed, that history was ending and the victor would determine future existence for the entire globe, against an opposing force aligned perfectly opposite to it in terms of values. I would maintain that this was not in any sense prescribed by philosophers in the 19th century but at best palpitated by them, or extrapolated from trends. Far from directing the trends as kings, the philosophers were perhaps directed by the trends to fulfill a budding requirement of a history yet to be, but making itself--while in the process remaking all historical self-understanding to be an understanding of this particular history's rise.

Marxism first sets up the history of the world as the history of mechanical production, organized along certain dialectical oppositions whose latest, ending stage is industrial class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. And, in a sense, National Socialism reacts against two features in particular in this account: the notion of history as that of means of production, and the leveling of all differences to amount to just class; however, it is precisely this reaction against the totalizing character of Marxism and the leveling feature of capitalism that Marxism that for granted that makes national socialism also a totalizing ideology. Meanwhile, liberal democracy reacts against both along the axis of collectivism and individualism.

Now, there are two ways we can understand the outcome of this human construction of a dialectical history; either it fizzled--there was no final synthesis, and the victor was just drawn from either side of the conflict without proceeding through the stage of the negation of the negation of the other. IE: capitalism just wins in a dualistic conflict with collectivism and doesn't take its nature into itself. Meanwhile, we could read national socialism perhaps as a failed attempt at synthesis,in that it combined the perpetual mass mobilization of socialism and a corporatist dividing up of industry with a money and profit structure. This would surely be controversial, with certain left wingers today--even Zizek--preferring to call Nazism a "pseudo-event" that doesn't fit into their dialectical picture at all, rather than representing a failure of that picture itself. On this view it is not Nazism that is the pseudo event but dialectic historical narrative that is.

We can also describe this fizzling of dialectic in terms of thermonuclear war: the great global conflagration between the capitalist and communist states, which i have described many times and am confident in as the inevitable historical narrative in a non-nuclear twentieth century, was thwarted by the possibility of total annihilation. This conflagration would have transformed the victor into that "negation of the negation" of its other--whether capitalism in the case of communism or vice versa--because of the intensity of a mass mobilization that, perhaps, only a hybrid of the two systems could have absolutely perfected.

But its possible for another reason: that the dialectical process did complete itself in the triumph of this post-cold war order, and that dialectic now faces its opposite: the resumption of multiple histories that arose or were transformed out of the triumph of of the totalizing historical narrative--but splinter off from it and feed back against it in a new and fundamentally non-dialectical conflict (with the terrorists being a false dialecticization of a multiple enemy.) this is the reading i prefer--but the question arises, when is the historical site of completed dialecticization? is it the fall of the Berlin wall, or does it develop before?

Have we not, rather, pinpointed the site through an engagement with Curtis's works? Ernest Dichter, the founder of modern advertising, considered himself more than just a money maker but a patriot in that he found ways of effectively continuing the mass-mobilization of American society after the war. Without consumerism, he said, millions of men previously employed as soldiers would return home--and with no demand for war goods, factories would close, unemployment would skyrocket and socialism might succeed. Yet the only way to gainfully employ so many people in an industrial economy would be to drastically ramp up production--and to do this meant ramping up demand, which meant ramping up desire. At the same time, the techniques of game theory were busy creating an internalized, mathematical representation of our enemy--only to become the basis of economic organization for the world.

Thermonuclear war sublimated the vast, apocalyptic confrontation and the true world war; the same mass mobilization that started in World War Two and would have continued and become totalized in an age of global violence was thwarted. And dare I go out on a limb and say that the communist powers would have won? I will say it; the soviet military machine in 1945 endured vastly more hardship, fighting, victories and defeats than the United states military. Despite many millions dead, the Soviets still fielded four times the divisions as the United States and Britain along with similar numbers of air craft and tanks--and their models were greatly superior to ours. The Soviets had basically defeated the Germans before we entered the war against on a combat front on d-day (the Italian campaign involved but a small fraction of German strength,) and even after the landing the bulk of German forces were concentrated on the eastern front.

I believe that the communist system was capable of a mass mobilization, and a mass sacrifice of all human values, for victory in a way that our system simply wasn't. Americans lost a few hundred thousand men and gave up much of our cherished discretionary goods; we donated tin cans and went without new car tires. but in Russia every fiber of the being of the people was either directed to the front or in arms production. it is true that this sacrifice, along with successive waves of mass tragedy for decades before, eventually eat away all the positive social ties of the Russians and their empire crumbled away as much by a deep malaise and depression as anything else; however, as long as the war machine kept turning they would have continued against us, mobilizing new nations as they went under the self-fulfilling prophecy of the people's revolution.

And who knows? Maybe this phase and the aftermath would have looked something like the provisional dictatorship of the proletariat that leads to a communist utopia. We''ll never know any of these things for sure.; however, we do know that the advent of nuclear weapons thwarted history from a very different course that had been building for centuries; and it was put on a new course that invented, from marxism, a new and hidden dialectic not between the bourgeoise and proletariat, but between capitalism and communism as systems themselves. The synsthesis would com, as it always does, as the negation of the negation; that is, the negation of communism as the negation of capitalism, which produced a capitalism of mass mobilization responding to the mobilization of an insatiable desire.

There is a sense in which we did learn game theory from the Soviets. In them there was an irrational and all encompassing will to survive/win that would stop at nothing, and which utterly dispensed with all humanity in pursuit of victory. specifically in Stalin. We learn from World War Two, as the culmination of many wars, that rationality could break the most indissoluble bonds between human beings, and transform them into killers.

Now, anyway, what we see here is the reality of the end of history resolving the last contradiction. For what is the end of history except, not utopia which is just a projection, but--thermonuclear war? The accomplishment of it in fact creates a virtuality in our historic understanding that affects the last dialectical move. But the earth moves underneath, and it is the earth that furnishes the uranium. The earth has furnished the means for the immediate, terrible realization of the repressed wish of the civilized: to make it all end (which just is ressentiment.)

We ought to ask: why has the earth furnished us with this power? With its own native power? and why did being send us the understanding, yield itself as intelligible in such a way that the construction of bombs is even possible? With Heidegger we say "language speaks." "Language speaks us" but why did language speak out the plans for a hydrogen bomb? These are insolent questions; god withdrew from the world to leave it to its own devices. prayers no longer reached him, and people were not gathered. And in this rebellion there was just death, the drive to which was furnished by our will against the world; the means in which was furnished by the world, to give this curious monkey enough rope to hang himself with.

What are we being told by the existence of this choice? Zizek wrote somewhere that if we truly have the power, through the technological, to close off the horizon of being's sending--then it was illusory all along, being subject as it is to human caprice. But what if we are precisely given this choice, as is set up carefully by the affairs of history. Yet--this means that the choice is not an illusion but a real choice. We will either annihilate ourselves with our machines, or we will dwell on the new earth. And the hand of God has guided all history to this point with the utmost poiesis. In this we can be assured a good victory.

The laws of the universe are not of iron but putty. They are not carved in stone, but written on an etch-a-sketch. And "Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the Kingship is a child's. " God spoke, as in a song, and brought the world together in its stars and galaxies. And these, by his singing, he can make unmade.

The End of History came like a theif in the night.

I am starting to think that in a sense 1990 was the end of history, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Hegelian dialectic was completed in modern Capitalism.
So you hear: Communism is dead, Capitalism and democracy are the victors.
now all that remains to do is consolidate the strangler countries into global capitalism and democracy. The Neo-Conservative narrative. But what is interesting is that it is also the Neo-Liberal narrative too. So the political dialectic we see in the world today is one where with in the entire political body all opposition is with in the victor.
Marxism and Capitalism did not synthesize. One was defeated thereby breaking the waltz. (thesis, antithesis, synthesis.)
So now all opposition (that exists on a level of meaningful political power) is within the context of Capitalist Democracy.
And islamo-fascism and such are projected as opponents, but only in an insincere way. No one can look at any of those movements as anything but an out growth of Capitalism.
So when the Marxist speaks to day you always hear the same reply: "Capitalism won, its over."
But what is it that is over? What was it that Capitalism and Communism were fighting over?
They were fighting to be the end of history in the Hegelian sense.
And now the next move in history is by necessity a non Hegelian move. So of course the story isn't over... but the part of it that is refereed to as 'history' with in the Hegelian system is over.

Reply to Non on Subjectivity:

There's no problem about the subject except a lot of hooey. It is a simple, imaginary spatial feature--a dot--that is always about three or four inches behind the eyes, moving with them as we move. It exists in our awareness precisely the same way as any other object thing that happens to be behind us--in tension over its possibilities of action that we cannot see, updated by sounds (and, God forbid, smells) that corroborate to various doings--crashes, bangs, rustlings, footsteps, etc; except, of course, for the fact that the subject is silent, odorless, and tasteless.

And since we have never seen the subject, we don't know what it is; if you know that there's a baby behind you, for instance--and you are busying yourself with the dishes, then you know what to be on the alert for; what sounds coming from her and the other objects behind that would be a sign of danger, distress, or something being broken. Likewise you know how to be on the alert if your waiting for the bus and there's some bum behind you who's thinking...God knows what he's thinking but its sure that have to do with your wallet--or worse! But the subject is something we've never encountered, and hence don't know what to do with.

Its like a sign pinned on our back that we can't see or reach to pull off. Like a dog chasing his tail we can't ever seem to catch it in front of us. It just sits there behind us, seeing what we see and do something we known not what behind us. Possessed of all of our feelings, thoughts, awarenesses--but also something more, what one might charitably call "the truth." The subject does stuff, though. Before we're even done with our thoughts it encircles them like an anaconda whose skin is all one big mouth that immediately sinks around what it encircles. If one didn't think of anything, the snake would just sink into itself--which is what it does all the time anyway, as it encircles other things. You want to know what the subject is? Its a Greco-Roman wrestler, that's who that little guy is. And he will fuck. you. up. He'll get you with the suplex so fast you won't even know what hit you.

By all means, if you want to be a mapmaker and get out your measuring tape and try to get the dimensions of this snake--be my guest. I can tell you already that you won't be able to see it to measure, and the only shape you'll get and the only analysis be able to perform is on the shape of the measuring tape itself, as the snake wraps around it. He can wriggle out of any topological description too, and eat it. The black snake of nihilism, as Nietzsche puts it. The Oroboros, the snake that eats itself. But Descartes's intuition was right: the pineal gland is situated right about where the subject should be, and the fact that it actually produces serotonin is not proof that the subject is a mystical object that connects to the body by a voodoo that needs no site of connexion; it proves that it is imaginary.

As a corollary: the imaginary is only viewed by the image of the viewer, which as we said cannot be viewed (unless it is--and then the viewer of that viewer isn't viewed. ha ha.) Thus, the imaginary itself cannot thus be viewed in its entirety, and thus--what we're really dealing with is the unintrepretability of dreams. The inability to transform the imaginary into an image with borders, or a source. The imaginary only has borders within itself; the borders are images of borders. Incipient dream-time. But when does this whole business arise, historically speaking? Again--it is absolutely with the destruction of the firmament. As we've already established: this guy is a tricky one and can wriggle out of most anything; and robbed of a universal home over everything, he shattered into each and every lacuna of our vision, filling it with the old celestial machinery.

So with that being said,there remains a certain discussion of strategies, a discussion of the business of topology, and how the subject is constructed. Plato already described the space that constructs the subject, and did a most admirable topology. The subject is in the cave,and is defined by a certain place in that cave. There are many places that resemble the cave: a classroom resembles it, especially insofar as the teacher is a pat functionary of centrally planned lessons confirmed by tests, and a theater is even more. But the modern American den with its television and computer screens, or better yet the motion picture show, resembles it the most. These places only constitute together 90% of typical waking life during childhood? Where else do you need to look?

This leaves us with the matter of strategy. One immediately has the idea of pitting some kind of mongoose against the snake--but if such a thing were possible, which I cannot see, one would have the problem of the old lady who swallowed a fly. The mongoose would, by necessity, be an even tougher customer than the snake, and there's no way to anticipate its effects.

This leaves us with the strategy enunciated by Burl Ives character in "The Big Country:"

"The next time you come a busting and blazing into my place scaring the kids and the women folks, when you invade my home, like you was the law or God Almighty... then I say to you, I've seen every kind of critter God ever made, and I ain't never seen a more meaner, lower, pitiful, yellow, stinking hyprocrite than you! Now you can swallow up a lot of folks and make them like it, but you ain't swallowing me. I'm stuck in your craw, Major Terrill, and you can't spit me out! You hear me now! You've rode into my place and beat my men for the last time and I give ya warning, you step foot in Blanco Canyon once more and this country goin' to run red with blood until there ain't one of us left! Now I don't hold mine so precious, so if you want to start, here, start now!"

The strategy here is the strategy of "getting stuck in the craw" by developing a shape that the snake can't swallow. This can be in the form of an intellectual exercise in constructing a time bomb of infinite multiplicity that blows in the creatures throat. The problem is that this shape may be the same--or is easily confused--with the snake in itself, when it consumes itself. In this way it amounts to "letting the snake alone" like Schopenhauer's Castle of solipsism, and leaving it to consume itself behind a safe partition. As Ray notes,the idea of partitioning things in the brain is misguided. The brain is necessarily leaky. it will always forget its booby traps while wandering through the labyrinth that is the brain, and fall into the pit all over again. It can, also, as the quote suggests, come in the form of making resistance at the disenfranchised remnants of those communities that have not been assimilated to subjectivity at all. This is better: but the problem is that, in the current form, the disenfranchised either acquiesce or are driven to their one option in a disfiguring suicidal despair. the hope here is to find non-destructive social machines to couple into.

The final strategy, what we could call the Eucharistic or hallucinogenic--the transubstantiatory; things that, when consumed by the subject,have a qualitative effect. That metamorphosize the mouths into pores. That change the all-consuming into a vomitus of long-contained discontents. To change the direction from one of an enclosing shrinking-in, to an outer-directed explosion--with all the suppleness of the anaconda--with which feelings and ideas can attach to. These are all dangerous and messy, though ultimately necessary in many cases, as long as we proceed with due caution. and the goal in this is a subject that takes in and sets lose flows with an expanding and intensifying effect--at times skirting a zone of mutating irradiation--but which don't cycle endlessly, but take in one end and let out the other. Do this all in a way that resonates with the despairing, half-assimilated underclass, and uses both for a machine that does not demolishes, but ceases the near monopoly, of the various cave forms in the middle period of our maturation as children.

The point, however, is that the movement of the subject, its telos and the inward direction of its flow, are functions of a qualitative ideology (a logos in images) and on that level it can be hacked. Try it.

--I should add, by the way, that what all this tries to show that what is powerful in the subject is not its topology but its material, which is novel and amazing. The topological logic of subjectivity qua absolute inwardness is a logic found other places, and is really quite simple. And at any rate this is not mathematical but imaginary and must be dealt with as such.